Ursula K. Le Guin on Writing in the 21st Century

Ursula K. Le Guin once recounted in an essay for The New Yorker an anecdote about submitting a short story to Playboy in the late sixties. Her agent, Virginia Kidd, had sent the story, “Nine Lives,” a work of science fiction in which most of the characters were men, to the magazine’s fiction editor. “When it was accepted,” Le Guin wrote of her agent, “she revealed the horrid truth.” The horrid truth, of course, was that the two initials at the front of her pen name, U. K. Le Guin, stood for Ursula Kroeber. The story’s author was a woman.

_Playboy’_s editors responded that they would still like to publish the story, but asked if they could print only Le Guin’s initials, lest their readers be frightened by a female byline. “Unwilling to terrify these vulnerable people,” Le Guin wrote, “I told Virginia to tell them sure, that’s fine.” After a couple of weeks, Playboy asked for an author bio. “At once, I saw the whole panorama of U.K.’s life,” Le Guin remembered, “as a gaucho in Patagonia, a stevedore in Marseilles, a safari leader in Kenya, a light-heavyweight prizefighter in Chicago, and the abbot of a Coptic monastery in Algeria.” Eventually, Le Guin did submit an author bio. It read: “It is commonly suspected that the writings of U. K. Le Guin are not actually written by U. K. Le Guin, but by another person of the same name.” Playboy printed it.

Le Guin may have employed fantasy to travel beyond the facts of her biography, but her many novels would travel well beyond the fantasy genre. As her latest author bio now states, Le Guin has written more than 60 books of fiction, children’s literature, poetry, drama, criticism, and translation. This bio appears, next to her portrait, on the back sleeve of Steering the Craft, a reprise of Le Guin’s classic manual for aspiring writers, out tomorrow. As she explained by phone from her home in Portland, Oregon, Le Guin decided that the original book, published in 1998, needed to be rewritten for a modern era, to address “this weird, chaotic situation we’re in.”

Since last November, when she delivered those arresting remarks at the National Book Awards, Le Guin has become something of a moral authority on the weird, chaotic situation we’re in. “I think hard times are coming,” Le Guin said into the microphone after accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, “when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being.” In what was one of very few National Book Awards speeches to go viral, Le Guin uttered one line in particular, “We will need writers who can remember freedom,” that seemed to get cut-and-pasted into tweets en masse, stopping many in their Twitter-scanning tracks. (Ursula Le Guin: “We will need writers who can remember freedom.” Click.) We asked Le Guin about the speech, the new edition of Steering the Craft, and why exactly the word fucking is, as she writes in the book, “a really big tick.”

Why did you decide to update this book?

Publishing has been changing so much in the last ten, fifteen years. Anything you write about writing, that was written in the nineties, has to be updated to really have anything to do with this weird, chaotic situation we’re in at present. Means of publishing are so different. They’ve changed so much. Self-publishing is a real option now.

The original book grew out of a single workshop in writing that I gave. Just a one-week workshop. And as time went on, I began to disagree with some of the things I said in the first book. Or I wanted to work out some things better. I got feedback from readers about the book and about the exercises—whether they worked or not. I wanted to use all that. So I actually entirely rewrote the book. It’s substantially the same book, but almost every sentence is rewritten.

You say that skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write, and that it may also show you what you want to write. You say, “Craft enables art.” Do you frequently have that experience, that your skill is showing you what you want to write?

Yeah, only it isn’t a conscious thing. It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s funny, the only example I can give you of it in action is in poetry rather than prose fiction. If you learn how to write a certain form in poetry, like a sonnet or a villanelle, practicing the form often gives you a large part of the poem. This interaction between the form and the contents—it’s something like, when you’ve learned how to tell the story, you sort of know some of the ways to tell stories. Those ways kind of lead you into finding new stories. And what it means, of course, basically, is just practice.

You also say that the basic elements of language are physical—the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. I wondered if you could remember some of the first books that awakened you to the sound effects of prose.

I use one of them in Steering the Craft. It’s Kipling’s Just So Stories, which were read to me as a little child, and which I still reread, I’ve read to my kids. They are the perfect read-aloud stories. They’re all full of repetitions and silliness, silly words. Mispronounced words. Everything that kids almost always would respond to. Like it was music.

In the book you actually compare punctuation to the pauses that appear in sheet music. And you compare a writer ignorant of the medium to a fiddler who’s playing off-key. Do you believe that grammar is essentially musical?

Grammar and syntax are kind of the skeleton of the sentence. A sentence can’t move forward unless it’s got a good skeleton and its legs are properly articulated, the knees work and all that. A horse galloping is a kind of music, right? The rhythm and the forward pace and everything. The sentence structure is the bones of the horse. So you can’t have the music without that free, easy coordinated movement.

I was interested to read your comment that morality and grammar are related. How are morality and grammar related?

Well, that’s really complicated. [laughs] I spend some time on that in the book. The thing is, it’s grammar in the sense of being able to write a clear sentence that means what you intend it to mean. If you can’t do that, it’s very hard to write anything honestly. Because it isn’t saying what you thought you wanted it to say. And of course, if you misuse language to lie, you can use perfectly good grammar doing that, too. So the relationship there is very, very complicated.

In fact, you can use excellent grammar to do that.

Yes. Yes. Good liars often are very eloquent speakers and writers.

You mention that the rhythm of Virginia Woolf’s prose is to your ear the subtlest and strongest in English fiction. And I agree, but I don’t think I could articulate why. I wondered if you had thought about it, and if you might be able to articulate why her prose is so subtle and perhaps therefore so strong.

I haven’t really thought about it. Tolkien is the only one I ever really thought seriously about why his prose worked so well for me. But Woolf—certainly part of it is the tremendous flexibility of her sentence length and rhythm. It changes all the time, kind of depending on what she’s writing about or whose mind she’s in. And it’s just kind of fascinating in itself. She wrote an essay, “On Being Ill.” And as I recall, there’s a sentence in it that goes almost a page. And then she writes, “But no;" [laughs] two words. It’s just perfect!

You call qualifying adjectives and adverbs “bloodsuckers” and compare them to ticks. You say you have to dig them out right away. You say in particular that the qualifier “fucking” is a really big tick. Why is “fucking” a really big tick?

[laughs] People seem to feel that it intensifies what they’re saying. And of course, it’s so common now that all it does is just weaken it. They’re just sort of needing this noise again. Fucking. [laughs]

I wanted to ask you about your comments at the National Book Awards. The comment, “We'll need writers who can remember freedom,” but also, “We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.” I wondered if you felt we are losing a grasp of this difference.

I don’t think we as readers and writers are. But I think the powerful market forces and corporations that increasingly control writing—they know the difference, too, and what they want is the market commodity. They don’t care about the art. There’s not ever been very much profit in art, really, despite Damien Hirst. Is that art or is it just a pickled shark?

One can ask these questions. But, particularly, fiction has been highly commodified. And that’s fine within limits. I mean, yeah, sure, a lot of genre writing produces a commodity. Romances are written often to a formula, and so on. And there are readers who want that, and that’s fine. But there should remain a large and noble place for the writing that is not written to sell but to be itself.

Oxford comma or no Oxford comma?

Let’s see, in my day, we called it a serial comma. Yeah, I want the extra comma. That’s the one between the last two elements. I want it there because often when it isn’t there, I misread the sentence. It’s purely a matter of clarity, and therefore make it a rule. Just put it in. It’s easier not to have to brood about it. Leave it in. Okay?